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The captaincy is not a starring role: Feschuk

When Maple Leafs GM Lou Lamoriello recently told TSN that his team might go another season without a captain, the first thing that popped to mind was: Hmmm. Maybe team president Brendan Shanahan has been reading what I’ve been reading.

It’s been assumed by most in Leafland that it’s only a matter of time until Auston Matthews is wearing the “C.” The idea of Matthews as captain, given his status as the NHL’s presumed rookie of the year and a franchise cornerstone, would follow the NHL trend of anointing a team’s most skilled player as its sacred-letter-wearing leader.

Many have tabbed Auston Matthews as the next captain of the Maple Leafs after his outstanding rookie season. But there's much more to the role than goals and assists. (Mark Blinch / NHLI via GETTY IMAGES)

But the author of a remarkable new book would argue such a copycat move would be unwise — especially if the Maple Leafs are striving for the kind of sustainable, perennial greatness Shanahan says they are. New York journalist Sam Walker began researching this book, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World’s Greatest Teams, with an eye toward writing a column for the Wall Street Journal, where he was founding sports editor. His initial idea was to identify the 10 greatest teams in history. But what he figured would be a two-week project turned into an 11-year deep dive into the inner workings of dynasties.

Walker looked at some 1,200 teams going back to the 1880s before crafting a list of the 16 greatest teams in history. What surprised him was that the common thread among these freakishly great teams wasn’t financial heft or savvy management or alpha-dog, smarter-than-thou coaching. The common thread was a captain whose presence invariably coincided with a run of extended dominance. Walker coins this group of men and women Tier One captains. (There’s no Toronto content in the Tier One group, although Ted Kennedy and Syl Apps, the captains of the Maple Leafs’ mid-20th-Century dynasty, get a mention in Tier Two).

Some among this exclusive roll call are famous — among them Tim Duncan, whose San Antonio Spurs won five championships; Maurice Richard, whose 1950s Montreal Canadiens won five straight Stanley Cups; Bill Russell, whose Boston Celtics won 11 championships in 13 seasons; and Yogi Berra, the glue-guy catcher of five World Series winners for the New York Yankees. But many of them are not well known. What’s most interesting is that they all share very few of the cliched traits that the modern conventional wisdom has come to view as the stuff of “captain material.”

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Only a few were great individual players in their primes. Many were not. One of the book’s bedrock revelations is that the important qualities of great leaders don’t include things like talent or charisma or media friendliness (or even friendliness, period). In other words: Somewhere along the way, the world started valuing the wrong things in team leaders.

“The faulty idea is that the leader should be obvious,” Walker said in a recent interview. “That you should be able to look at the person with the most talent, the most charisma, the most emotion — the person that seems like the obvious choice — and it’s the person to choose. All of my research — and a ton of academic research that’s been done, too — all points to the absolute opposite conclusion.”

So about the idea of the Leafs promptly naming their best young asset as captain?

“What I would say is, ‘Absolutely don’t do that,’” Walker said. “Like, you cannot balance the pressure of stardom to perform at the highest level with managing a team. It’s just not something that’s ever worked before.”

“Worked,” of course, is relative. There’ve been championship teams captained by stars. Michael Jordan and Derek Jeter are prototypical examples. But neither Jordan’s Bulls nor Jeter’s Yankees make Walker’s list. And some of the best passages in the book poke convincing holes in the leadership resumes of both men. Walker points out that Jordan, as great as he was, could be mean-spirited and immature as a teammate. It’s often forgotten that Chicago coach Phil Jackson paired Jordan with a co-captain for each of the Bulls’ duelling three-peat runs at the NBA ring; Bill Cartwright and Scottie Pippen were Jordan’s foils. And don’t get Walker started about Jeter.

“All these teams think, ‘We need a captain who’s going to sell tickets and be great for the sponsors and never get in trouble and who’s going to support the coach and who’s going to be an institution.’ Like Derek Jeter, right? A company man. That’s the idea. That’s what everybody’s shooting for,” Walker said. “But with these (Tier One) captains, the absolute opposite was true. If (a coach or management) did anything they thought was affecting the team’s ability to perform, they would push back immediately. They would really be pains in the ass . . . Derek is just not one of these characters.”

Jeter, indeed, was a member of five World Series championship teams. But the first four were won when the Yankees were captained by Paul O’Neill.

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“Paul O’Neill is right out of central casting for the (prototypical Tier One captain),” Walker said. “The moment he left, that was it. And Jeter took over.”

That prototypical Tier One captain has qualities that aren’t particularly glamorous. Grittiness is common. (Buck Shelford, captain of the dominant New Zealand All Blacks rugby squad, earned eternal respect after unknowingly playing a crucial match with what turned out to be a torn scrotum — balls out, as the saying goes). Ditto an aversion to the spotlight. (Carla Overbeck, captain of the U.S. women’s soccer juggernaut better known for big-name stars Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain, eschewed a post-World Cup victory tour in favour of going home to do laundry).

Tier One captains, by and large, don’t give eloquent speeches, don’t always agree with the coach and management, and don’t always play by the rules. (Tom Brady isn’t among the Tier Ones, but Walker cites him as a near-miss candidate whose urge to, say, deflate a few footballs, speaks to an undeniable drive to win by any means necessary).

But balance is key. While some of these great leaders partly defined themselves by a willingness to be unsportsmanlike — Mireya Luis, the captain of the Cuban women’s volleyball team that won three Olympic golds, once encouraged teammates to shout vulgarities at an opponent to turn the momentum of a match — others only became great leaders after they learned to control their emotional outbursts. Richard, for instance, was infamously hot-tempered in his early NHL incarnations but channelled his rage more productively with age. Not that aggression can’t be an effective leadership strategy. The book recounts how Tier One captain Valeri Vasiliev, he of the Soviet hockey powerhouse that trounced Canada 8-1 in the final of the 1981 Canada Cup, once choked Soviet coach Viktor Tikhonov to make a point about team unity. Squad brought together, they were nearly unbeatable for years.

“The captain,” writes Walker, “is the figure who holds sway over the dressing room by speaking to teammates as a peer, counselling them on and off the field, motivating them, challenging them, protecting them, resolving disputes, enforcing standards, inspiring fear when necessary, and above all, setting a tone with words and deeds.”

Captaincies, more recently, have been used as contractual perks or marketing tools. Even sporting institutions that once knew better appear confused. Take Brazil’s men’s national soccer team. When that juggernaut was at its best, winning World Cups in 1958, 1962 and 1970, the team’s best player was Pele. But as Walker is surprised to learn, Pele was never the captain. That role was played by a series of defenders — “water carriers,” as Walker calls them. And the theory, expressed in the book by 1970 captain Alberto Torres, goes that the weight of stardom and the responsibility of the captaincy simply weren’t compatible. Witness the team’s fortunes since naming Neymar, the resident star player, as captain.

“It’s a disaster. And it’s amazing they would go against all their traditions,” Walker said.

Not that traditions should be blindly followed. Recent tradition in pro sports, where the show is sometimes as important as the result, has dictated that Jeter-esque specimens are prime candidates for captaincies. But Walker said his book has at least begun a conversation about the wisdom of such notions. Chicago Cubs general manager Theo Epstein, who’s been talking about the value of team chemistry for years now, provided a supportive blurb for Walker’s book.

“There’s been a lot (of interest from pro sports teams) . . . One baseball GM actually made a big offer to a player after reading the book — a guy who he thought was this kind of character — and the player ultimately signed somewhere else,” Walker said. “The message seems to be getting out.”

If the Leafs have been in touch — well, Walker didn’t mention it. But if Toronto’s plan is to wait before bestowing the “C,” Walker is in favour. Not to say Matthews can’t be captain, but further evaluation of the possibilities would seem prudent.

“It’s possible to be a star and to play this role. But most (Tier One captains) weren’t stars,” Walker said. “Don’t get me wrong. You can win a title doing it a different way. Lots of different kinds of teams win things . . . But if we’re talking about sustained greatness — a culture, a level of dominance, that sustains itself over time — that’s what everyone’s chasing. And that is the great Holy Grail in modern sports.”

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